Paul Krugman is the primary reason I'm glad the NY Times opened up TimesSelect to people with .edu email addresses. It was a pain to have to go through the library's website and access it through Lexis/Nexis, even though some of the time, he's the only thing worth reading.

Anyway, Krugman is on the post-Katrina response today, and ties it in nicely with the Op-Ed the NY Times wrote earlier this week (and which I commented on here) because it illustrates vividly just how this administration works. I'll let Krugman tell it:

Today, much of the Gulf Coast remains in ruins. Less than half the federal money set aside for rebuilding, as opposed to emergency relief, has actually been spent, in part because the Bush administration refused to waive the requirement that local governments put up matching funds for recovery projects — an impossible burden for communities whose tax bases have literally been washed away.

On the other hand, generous investment tax breaks, supposedly designed to spur recovery in the disaster area, have been used to build luxury condominiums near the University of Alabama’s football stadium in Tuscaloosa, 200 miles inland.

It seems that no matter what bit of Bush policy you look at, it always comes down to this--those who have, get more, and those who don't get crapped on, even when they vote for us. And there may be no greater recent article on this phenomemon than on this underblogged article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone about the extraordinary levels of corruption in Iraq, and the criminal way in which this administration has looted the US Treasury in order to reward its friends. If you don't have enough outrage to last the long weekend, read the Taibbi piece. It'll rebuild the fire in you.

Here's the Random Ten. Put your computer's music player on random play and post the next ten songs to pop up, even if Mannheim Steamroller is on there and it's not even Christmas shopping season yet. Here we go.